Wow! It has gigabit onboard, an faster CPU (with integrated GPU!) , double Sytem memory, is compatible to extension modules of the original Raspberry Pi.

Especially for multimedia use cases, like HD (1080p and even higher) streaming the Banana Pi looks quite nice. At the moment, XBMC is not fully compatible to the banana pi, but the bigger the fan group the faster XBMC will work on supporting the new toy.

I will try to get one of the boards to get a first impression and will write about it in the future.

A good review of Banana pi is available at: http://raspi.tv/2014/banana-pi-review-first-impressions. The author is describing some problems while installation, but I think that is a common problem for new products. One particular complaint is very interesting, he mentioned that the linux SD card image is bigger then needed, because they included free space to the image – what a pitty.